Satow's Diplomatic Practice (6th Edition)
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Ernest Mason Satow was born at Clapton, Essex, in 1843. He was the son of a Swedish merchant who had settled in England, and an English lady, Margaret Mason. In his studies at University College, London, he read at an early stage a borrowed copy of Laurence Oliphant’s Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China. This aroused in him a desire to know Asia. In 1861 he came first in an examination for a student interpretership in the Far East. He was assigned to the British Consular Service in Japan.
After a short stay in Peking for Chinese studies, Satow arrived in Japan in 1862, nine years after the ‘opening up’ of that country by Commodore Perry to foreign presence and commerce. He found himself in the midst of the violent struggle between the partisans of the Shōgun, or chief of government, and the Emperor, which involved constant physical danger to foreign residents in Japan. The victory of the Emperor’s party ushered in the great Meiji Restoration period, in which Japan, after three centuries of isolation, assimilated with incredible seriousness and rapidity skills developed during those centuries in the Western world. For over 20 years Satow’s linguistic expertise, together with his adventurous travels (including shipwreck off the port of Hakodate) and his personal qualities, gave him a most remarkable position among Japanese of all backgrounds, and contributed greatly to the standing of the British Legation in Tokyo. Satow also started a family with Takeda Kane (1853–1932), his musumé (mistress, or common-law wife), with whom he cohabited in Tokyo from the 1870s until his departure from Japan in 1884. They had two sons, the younger of whom came to Britain to study botany some years later.
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